Friday, November 06, 2009

You and several other guests are at some one's house for dinner. The host serves a wine that is corked. What do you do?

Please use the poll on the left sidebar to give your answer. Poll closes on Wednesday of next week. I'll tell you why I'm asking after that. If you think I omitted something in the poll responses, please let me know in the comments.

16 comments:

Depends on the crowd. I picked number 3, because at a recent dinner 4 out of 6 people enjoyed a mildly corked wine, while two of us were bothered by it even though it was drinkable... If you are not among wine savvy folks - no need to rain on their parade... Just leave the wine in the glass and wait for the next bottle. After people were done with the wine I casually mentioned that this seemed like an off bottle...

Seems as though it would depend entirely on the host. Fellow wine geeks are affirmed by recognizing cock taint, but at somebody's aunt's Passover seder the tactful thing to so is probably to keep one's lip buttoned.

What Jack said. It's situationally dependent. Wine geek crowd, yes, "civilian", no, unless someone asked me if the wine was showing "as I expected". Again, you need to take a read of the room and see how receptive they are to something like that.

Some people get personnally insulted if their wine is corked, something I've never understood.Cheers!

I agree with Jack: discreetly tell the host/ess so that s/he can gracefully remove the wine from the table.

I recently was at dinner with a top French winemaker and a corked wine was poured for him. He didn't even flinch and drank the wine, not wanting to embarrass the host. When I tasted the wine and noticed it was corked, the winemaker just smiled and said, yes, I know.

I also was recently at dinner at one of my relatives... he brought out a 1997 Drouhin village Chablis that was so golden, you could tell that it was sherryized from a mile away. He was so proud to pour me this old Chablis that he had been saving. It was actually not offensive to drink. Just sherryized. I didn't say anything and half way through the meal he said, "I think this wine is off." I was glad I hadn't said anything and that he noticed for himself. Then we all went to shul.

I respectfully disagree with Jack. If this is not a winegeek dinner, you would be embarassing the host, even if you told him/her privately that the wine was corked. I would keep mumm. It's not the guest's job to educate the host or other guests about corked wines. But if it is a winegeek dinner, go ahead and mention it because chances are that some other winegeek will have noticed the TCA also, and in the context of a winegeek event, it's ok to rip on a flawed wine. Whereas in a dinner party, non-wine geek context, that is not the case as ripping on a corked wine may come across as (a) wine snobbery and (b) criticism of what the host has provided to his/her guests.

I agree with some of the prior comments, and only echo it here because it's not one of the multiple choice options. If a wine is corked I would pull the host aside and politely inform them of my "opinion on the wine". From there the host can do what they like, and I will happily respect.

I agree that it's situational. The main thing is: which response will get me laid or prevent me from getting laid? If it's my new girlfriend's family I will drink the stuff as if it were a rare bottle of Sassicaia.

If the host is a friend and there's more wine to be had (hey, at some non wine geek houses it's the corked wine or nothing) I wd choose my moment carefully.

asher - true, there are some hosts/hostesses where it's simply best to say nothing. Is this 15% of the time? I don't know. In general, the people I know would like to replace a defective wine rather than have people drink it. The whole idea, too, is not to make a big deal of it. Also, I don't relish drinking wine that's not right; isn't life too short to drink bad wine?